Riverview

The air source heat pump was installed last week.

We have two internal units. Here’s the one upstairs (2.5Kw). It’s coverless at the moment until the wall is plastered.

The external unit is whisper quiet. I really did not realise that it was running until I noticed the fan was going around!

One of the problems with the new house is the lack of installed heating, and the lack of mains gas. Most houses in the village appear to have oil, but apart from the fact that oil is just an outdated technology, the price of oil has doubled in the last year and I guess it’s unlikely to drop ever.

If we had loads of money then a Ground Source Heat pump would be great. But the cost of digging up the garden would be pretty much. Although we’ve discussed using some form of pellet fed wood boiler, these take too much room. Smaller pellet or wood boilers are good but the thing is a push button heating system is really what we need. With the type of jobs that we have, keeping a log fire constantly burning would be a waste of energy.

So of all the heating systems that seems to just leave a Air Source Heating Pump as a main boiler. I originally shelved this as they have the reputation of being noisy. However, apparently the latest ones are almost silent.

I still want to have either a wood pellet stove or a normal wood burning stove. These will have a back boiler which will feed water into the thermal store. There will also be sufficient solar panels to provide hot water throughout summer without any other heating.

So I mentioned thermal store before explaining what one is! Basically this is a battery to save all that lovely heat. A sufficiently large water tank that is highly insulated and can store heat from various sources at a sufficient temperature to even out outputted heat when the inputs are various iregular heat sources such as wood stoves. The hot water in these units is never in direct contact with anything else. Raidiators have a internal heat exchanger (a simple coil), an external Plate Heat exchanger is used for direct hot water. That’s also drinkable mains pressure hot water. Not some manky stuff stored in the attic with the dead pigeon floating in it!

Here’s a design of such a system. That company puts together quite cool thermal store systems. I’ve no prices, but apparently they are quite reasonable.

Since ASHP produce lower heat than normal radiators, we either need to have Under floor heating, oversized radiators or some alternatives. Without removing the floors under floor heating would be too expensive, and so far there are two possibilities:

Ecovators are normal radiators that use fans to distribute heat. They can be much smaller to distribute the required heat.

Another good alternative that delivers similar heat to under floor heating are the skirting board radiators. The Thermaskirt ones look to be the best.